On Potatoes and Distractions
by crinklescofftrip
Summary: Truthfully, Martin wished he could flush out all those howling snatches in his longterm memory. Those were hot potato thoughts, held for a moment whether he liked it or not, needing to be dropped before they could burn too much. Martin centered fic, taking place after Escape from the Citadel and before The Visitor.


" _You burn enough bridges, the only way to go is forward."_

A little bell hung just above the circuit of the doorway let out a cheerful jingle as the door swung open, and the Rascal walked in.

All through the bar, faces of varying sizes, hosting eyes of varying numbers, turned toward Martin as he stepped over the threshold. Standard practice. Even if he wasn't a species in short supply on his ownhome planet, nobody knew what kind of trouble might walk into a place like this. Another alien cantina on a planet so far flung out in the star system, it wouldn't even be a sparkle in the background of any constellation known on a little island in the middle of nowhere, flung far, far away.

Martin dropped himself onto a weathered stool by the bar, and hummed as he signaled the reptilian, octopus-like creature manning the taps. The bar was stained hard wood, polished up despite a few divets scarring the grain. Nice. Though it had seen better days. Out here, it had probably been salvaged from something else that had gone under a long time ago.

There was an enveloping din of people talking and glasses clinking against tables, but the door striking up another couple of jingles as marks came and went could still be heard. Which was good. Silences tended to slow Martin down and make him uncomfortable.

Most humans, he would bet, would feel pretty uncomfortable in his shoes right then, and not just because the guy that he lifted them from wore them two sizes too small. But old Marty ordered a frosty pint of the cantina's best goop and threw the bar tender a wink.

"Gear up the soda guns, I'm starting a tab!"

Like a breed above the rest.

Martin didn't see if his bravo-ous assertion impressed the reptilian on the other side of the counter. He was already skimming the roomful of Toms, Dicks, and Henrys with his eyes when the tankard was set down within reaching distance. He spotted a cluster of fellas hunched around a circular table who looked enough like pigeons to satisfy his needs, and set his mind to wander their way. If the reptile noticed that he hadn't paid his tab, it either wasn't worried or didn't care, and Martin didn't either.

Dimly lit and close to the wall, the table offered the people sitting around it every chance to size up any newcomers waltzing up. But Martin could see at a glance that his marks had cards fanned out in front of them, and a pool of colored bits, who's meaning Martin didn't need to guess, piled in the table's center. No one seemed to be avidly playing the game. The people were talking in hushed tones about garbage he didn't care about one way or the other.

Affable grin breaking out under his bread, Martin clapped both hands onto the back of one mark's chair.

What were struggles to some people were gifts to him. Confidence was always an easy enough facet to summon up—by rule, for a conman—but Martin had a gift that made the effect sell quicker. Because he lived life entirely on the surface waters of his facilities, it made the effected depth of his fancy appear to go deeper. And it was a gift that's benefits never failed him.

No one taking a passing glance would have guessed that he had escaped the Citadel that very day—or perhaps it could have been a week ago, for all he cared. Either way, this was not the first new dawn in an alien world that he'd experienced, slipping unscathed from a seemingly catastrophic event that he had no idea how to explain he even found himself mixed up in to begin with. Even to himself, only the stiffness in the muscles of the leg he had to regrow hinted that anything had happened at all, as he maneuvered himself into the chair that he had just assaulted, it's occupant having jumped up from the surprise. When all the marks stared at him, Martin's smile didn't waver.

"What are we playing, fellas?"

While the group at the table suddenly perked up and remembered their cards, Martin had the option to notice that the majority of the faces greeted him with scowls that were anything but well hidden. Details received and dropped from his awareness by a leap of decision making too quick to be considered. By this omission, it was easy to carry over into ignoring the tension in the silence that followed for half a beat, while the guys gathered their cards up to their chests and eyed one another around him.

Whatever they were playing, of course, didn't matter to him.

After a few cycled looks around the table, the unseated member pulled up a chair from another table, and the mark directly across from Martin gave him the name of their game.

"Well, what are we doing then? Deal me in, deal me in!"

Somewhere in the deep abyss of his past, Martin remembered his father telling him that it didn't matter if he didn't have a plan so long as he could improvise, and Martin certainly could. A turn of the tables was a matter of dropping a thought like a hot potato and moving onto the next, nice and smooth, so no one could guess it had been picked up to begin with. Somewhere down the line, the rules that could so easily tether others with invisible binds stopped looping around Martin. He never bothered to put his finger on exactly why. He didn't think he missed them anyway.

While his companions at the table dealt him into their game, he began to speak. He liked speaking. He fancied it was one of his golden attributes. And the thing, the really GREAT thing about it was, that when Martin was saying a thing, he could _mean_ it. He had passed through hospitals and wars, tight knit crews and ships that had carried him through seas and skies, by way of learning how to take up the causes of others at moment's notice. It was just a matter of scenting what the current cause was this time around.

The guy across the table had a chubby beet-red face and a scowl that tugged up an image of a similar look on the face of the kid Martin had seen on the Citadel before his escape, the dopey sucker who hadn't had a starship on hand. He was the first human Martin had seen in more years than he cared to count, and whether or not he was his son was a thought that fizzled his attention for just a second before he dropped the thought.

There were times, far flung and island remote in their own right, when it occurred to him to wonder about how he had gotten to where he was in the present day. There was a time when he couldn't remember anything relating to his past at all. Things had been _easy_ then, but then the black curtain had to start opening up holes. There had gotten to be little pockets in his brain where information existed that he could push harder to uncover in full—if he wanted to. There were so many of them now, and the more that sprang up, the harder Martin had to work to continue being how he was. Just all the more hot potato thoughts to drop before they could burn too much. The important thing was not to fixate on them.

He liked keeping things loose after all. He was all instinct and flexibility, and knack for survival.

And the past was there to be put _behind_ you.

He arranged the playing cards in his hands, and truthfully couldn't remember if he had ever seen a single one of them before. He'd already forgotten the name of the game that they were playing.

Truthfully, he wished that he could forget everything in his longterm memory as easily these minor details in the present. It would be better to flush out all those exasperating snatches, if they were even small enough that he could really delude himself by calling them snatches anymore, and expunge the howling memories of a place that he once was, could have been, and could have been trying to do. Anything at all that could reduce the distractions…

Several of the alien lifeforms seated around the table began tossing chips into the center of the table. As one of them flung a piece in, Martin noticed a set of keys on the table by the guy's elbow. Whether for a starskipper or a doom buggie, the information wove itself into his immediate angle.

"Now we're talking, now we're talking! What's the fun of playing if there's nothing driving things, right fellas?"

He started to look down at himself for something of value to put up for the game. His line of sight dropped onto the stack of chips that had belonged to the group member he'd unseated. He immediately shoved the entire stack into the middle of the table.

A grumble was heard beside him, but Martin quickly asserted, "Don't you worry, now. I'll spot that back to you when I convert some funds for the next game, friend."

He flashed a wink at the guy next to him, but didn't keep his head angled that way long enough to infer waiting for a reply. He was betting on the size of the pot to deter a reaction from the group on the whole, as the rest of marks eyed the pile greedily.

Martin sat back in his chair and looked through his cards. They may not have been cards he knew, but they were all usually pretty much the same in places like this. Numbers and colors, and occasional faces made out in different patterns. Martin flipped through them, and his eyes fell on a card picturing a woman's outline adorn with hearts. A brightly colored hat covered the top of her head and matched her sweeping coat, with knowing eyes and a bemused smile. It only took a second for the knowledge to be there.

 _"You're alright, Doc."_

Minnie. _Min,_ looking down at him from above a hospital bed, looking right through him and having the gull to be charmed. Warm, loving, and accepting—but prepared to run like a bull at anyone who might try to make her a fool. The whole knowledge of a lifetime long since passed wholly enveloped Martin in the amount of time it took to look down at a picture, raised the hairs of his arms and along the back of his neck with the chill of all the ghostly could-have-beens that came with it, clear as day…

 _Hot potato._

Martin clapped his hand of cards onto the table and began to reshuffle them as he looked back up at the table. His grin was as bright and compelling as before when he locked eyes with the red faced man across the table and started to speak again. But whatever statement had been laying in wait to leap from his lips wasn't meant to reach the air before a scaly fist smashed into the side of Martin's face. The Rascal tumbled to the floor in a disconcerted heap, so good at forgetting that it took him a minute, after landing on the floor, to remember why the guy to his left had taken offence.


End file.
